


Counterpoint Riff

by Mithrigil



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: Developing Relationship, Emotional Constipation, F/M, Loss, Post-Canon, Recovery, Shower Sex, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 10:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17140175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: Faye stays with the Bebop, for now. Jet still isn't quite sure what that means - for the ship, yes, but mostly for them.(Also, he's definitelynotthinking about Spike.)





	Counterpoint Riff

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hakuen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hakuen/gifts).



The thing about _bonsai_ —

(Well, there are a lot of things about _bonsai_ , it is after all a delicate art with two thousand years of history and all the cultural baggage that goes with that history, and a whole lot of prolific and opinionated people who have been shouting at the top of their lungs in the hypothetical warehouse full of cultural baggage for all two thousand of those years about how that baggage needs to be cataloged and stored when sometimes all Jet wants is to relax in a room full of very small trees.)

—the thing about _bonsai_ is it’s hell on a man’s neck. Holding tiny scissors and tiny bits of twine and leaning in with a jeweler’s scope over his eye while he singles out which tiny branches need to go means cramps that shoot straight from one shoulder to the other and climb up his jugular all the way to his jaw.

Which is why he usually takes drinking breaks. Which is why an open bottle of _Wild Hen_ is currently perched on the lowest bank of trees, between an overeager Larch and a Chinese Pepper. It looks good there. It would look better if it were a little emptier. It would be easier to not think about Spike if it were emptier. And that ache in Jet’s neck is starting to make itself known again, which is why he takes matters, and by matters he means the bottle of _Wild Hen_ , into his own hands. Hand, singular. The one with the scissors, because it’s easier to hold two things in the hand with flesh traction.

“That’s terrible for the plants,” Faye chimes in from the hall.

“They’re not drinking it,” Jet points out, with the rim of the bottle still close enough to fog from his breath.

With the hallway still rotating behind her, Faye pulls herself in to the room, what little room there is left in it, and her short heels click onto the corrugated metal. She’s got her shoes on, her red jacket, her sunglasses, is carrying a sling bag. She’s dressed to leave. Jet wonders what hour it is.

“Have you checked the news yet?” she asks.

Jet shuts his eyes, though that makes the jeweler’s scope draw tight over his socket. “What time is it?”

“This would be the _morning_ news,” she says. There’s not much room for her to sit among the plants, but she leans her butt on the second ledge and drops her bag on the floor, like a punctuation for the sighing sarcasm Jet’s grown to expect from her these last two years.

The morning news. He tightens his hand around the neck of the bottle, and his feels just as tight. “He’s gone,” he says. It isn’t a question.

“So’s Red Dragon HQ,” she says. And that’s an answer.

Jet uncurls, sitting as far back as the crate will let him go. He puts down the bottle, the scissors, and the thread, in that order, and then brings his hands up to his face to pry off the jeweler’s scope, but his fingertips settle against his temples and don’t move just yet.

Staring into the dark behind his eyelids, Jet asks, completely seriously, “Has your bounty been reinstated?”

Faye scoffs and raps her fist on the wall. Her bracelet clanks. “It never left. Come on. Get this damn boat back in the black, Jet.”

Jet opens his eyes only to blink again. Then he looks at Faye, in the spinning light of the hallway and the mist-soaked halogen of this little room, and it doesn’t take a jeweler’s scope to see that her mascara isn’t clean, that she’s got gooseflesh on her collarbones and dents in her lower lip from biting it.

He takes off the scope and sets it down. “You’re staying?”

“For now,” she says. “But we need to leave. The colony if not the planet. Now.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, back and neck and crate creaking as he rises. In this space, two people standing brings them too close together, and passing through the door into the hall is almost impossible without touching her, even if she tries to move out of his way.

She doesn’t. If anything, she moves closer. Her arms are still crossed, but they’re pressed to his gut, sharp elbows and all, and her legs are cold between his, and she turns her forehead into his chest with her hair hiding everything, like a dust curtain on a table.

Jet’s never known what to do with a crying woman. No matter how many times crying women seem to happen to him, a functional solution never presents itself. But Faye isn’t crying, even if it’s clear she’d _been_ crying, and furthermore she’s Faye, and he’s pretty sure the last ten men who put their arms around Faye Valentine are either very much in prison or very, _very_ dead. And while Jet’s not sure if Spike counts as one of those men (and whether that’s true or not Jet _does not want to think about that right now_ ), if he were here he wouldn’t know what to do here either.

So he stalls in the doorway, and lets Faye breathe against his chest for a while, and keeps his arms at his sides. On the floor, the contents of her bag spill out in the uncertain gravity; epoxy, probably to fix the holes she shot into the interior hull last night (as Spike left – _not thinking about that_ ). To his left, the hallway rotates, a cycle and a half at least; to his right, the plants sit and grow, silent and imperceptible. He looks up at the ceiling, stretching his neck along the way, and Faye’s left elbow presses maybe a little too hard into his ribs but he lets it, lets her.

“You smell like a distillery,” she mumbles, the words warm through his clothes.

“You’d know,” he agrees, unable to help the sigh or the smile. And that’s a signal to step the rest of the way into the hall, and let it spin him to the cockpit.

Once he gets them back into space, and returns to the plants, she’s taken the bottle of _Wild Hen_. It shows up empty in the recycler two days later. Jet lets it slide.

 

*          *

Their first job as an unlikely duo goes about as horribly as can be expected, without being an actual failure.

One: The mark they bag turns out to be the _intended_ mark’s twin sister, and worth a tenth as much; Two: one of Jet’s ISSP contacts is dead a year out from retirement and his son holds a hell of a grudge; Three: neither of them will never be able to look at mangoes the same way again; and Four: every woolong they just earned is going to go toward replacing Jet’s arm.

“Hold _still_ ,” Faye grunts, trying in vain to shove the wrench counter-clockwise into Jet’s shoulder socket.

Jet’s got his flesh arm wrapped around the stair handrail for dear life, and what’s left of the prosthetic hanging limp and useless between them, and all he can say to that is, “I _am_!” in the exact same tone she’s using.

The wrench makes contact with the strut. It doesn’t hurt – okay, it doesn’t hurt much – okay, it doesn’t hurt any worse than usual, maybe this is a blessing in disguise – and once she starts clicking the wrench Jet’s able to tune out both the sound and the relatively minor pain. He grits his teeth and braces his head in the sweating crook of his flesh elbow, and lets Faye work.

“About time you replaced this antique anyway,” she says, as she finishes with the wrench and picks up the arm itself, readying to pull it out of the socket.

“Says the antique,” he teases, just as she gives a solid yank and Jet’s shoulder starts to float a little with twenty pounds less to keep it in line.

Something swats him on the ass. He looks over his empty shoulder at Faye’s thunderous pout. Both of her hands are wrapped around his prosthetic’s bicep. Holy mother of God, she just _spanked_ him with his own arm.

“Thank you,” he says, earnestly, because he knows other people have gotten squeamish dealing with his biotech – and then belatedly realizes what that just sounded like he was thanking her for, and sputters, “I mean,” if just to stave off the inevitable flush on his face.

She laughs, startled, and bites her lip at him with that _fatale_ smirk he’s seen her use on marks before. “What, you want another, big boy?”

“Enough,” he groans, and uncurls himself from the handrail. He’s careful turning around – it always takes him a while to find his new center of gravity, after – and tries again, holding his hand out for the arm. “I mean it, thanks. I can take it from here.”

She looks from his empty hand up to his eyes and then down to his chest. That vampy smirk is gone, but her face hasn’t fallen back into her homeland of sour and petulant yet, and Jet, for a moment, wishes he knew not what she’s looking at but what she’s _seeing._

“Let me get the med kit first,” she says, and oh. Right. He’s got to pack and sterilize the socket too.

“I know where it is.”

“Just sit down, you stubborn idiot,” she sighs, and okay, there’s the Faye he’s come to expect, nose flared a little and mouth tight as her head tosses exasperatedly side-to-side. She sashays out of the room, unceremoniously hucking the arm onto the nearest couch on the way.

Only after she’s out, nothing but a distant rummaging echoing from the bathroom, does Jet put a couple things together. She was staring at his chest. And she was blushing too.

Well. Okay. That’s a new development.

It’s pretty clear that, whatever the blue hell else Faye is thinking, she’s telling Jet to stay where he is. And she’s Faye, so telling someone _stay where you are_ is about as close as she’ll actually admit to _don’t leave me, you shithead_. Maybe she’s wrestling with the possibility that the casualty could have been Jet’s other arm, or worse. Maybe she’s still seeing Spike walk out, or Edward and Ein, or any of the other people who managed to get the drop on her before she could get the drop on them. Maybe a lot of things, which might not have anything to do with Jet in specific and everything to do with Faye, and Jet knows better than to poke that hornet’s nest just yet, if ever.

Regardless, simply by standing there thinking about it for a minute or two, he manages to obey the spirit of her command. And then she shoves him down on the couch and starts cleaning out his socket, which takes care of the letter of things.

 

*        *

No matter how many translations of ancient texts he reads on the land of his ancestors, no matter how he scours the Net or plumbs through digital archives or asks the old men that play shogi in the lots behind restaurant complexes that contain more than one ramen joint, Jet Black has not found any tips on gardening one-handed.

Maybe it’s not the kind of thing one talks about. God knows Jet would prefer not to think about it either.

Either way, here he is, holding his pair of tiny scissors in his hand, with no off-hand to isolate the leaves that need pruning or steady the little branches, and it’s enough to take his thoughts straight back to losing the arm in the first place.

Those ghosts are less restless now. Alisa, Pao, both resolved. With all Fad’s matters clear, for good or ill, there’s no more mystery, no more bitterness to his time in the ISSP and nothing to make him wonder if he should have stayed. With Spike gone—

(Would still prefer not to think about it, but it’s fine, it’s healthy, maybe it’s time? maybe it’s like pulling the bandage off? maybe it’s the kind of thing one-armed men did on ancient Earth instead of writing gardening tips for future generations? maybe they did poetry, contemplating the loss of the valued limb and the valued friend that was maybe also like a limb, if a limb could complain about Jet’s food and cause property damage on a scale usually left to transplanetary corporations?)

—with Spike gone there’s no more reminder around every corner of just what the Syndicates do to a man, what little they leave of him when they’ve simmered all the water out of his blood so that nothing remains but iron. Jet still can’t bring himself to check the news, not on purpose, Faye always manages to play it just loud enough so that Jet knows that the few known Red Dragon gangs that aren’t awaiting a speedy trial with a hung jury are getting shot in the street by, presumably, the next big thing. He knows that the vultures sweep in where the hawks fall, but he also knows that to Spike, it wasn’t about changing the system, it was about breaking free of it, so Jet _knows_ it wasn’t all in vain. He knows Spike died free. He knows Spike died alive.

He knows he’s not going to be able to trim these trees with one hand, damn it.

“Jet!” Faye hollers from god-knows-where. “Jet, we’re out of razor blades!”

He rolls his eyes. “Put them on the list!”

“What?”

“I said put them on the list!” he yells, a little louder, then goes back to contemplating the tiny scissors and the tiny leaves and feels, not for the first time, like a goddamn one-armed gorilla. “We wouldn’t be out of them if you’d get a damn autosharp,” he adds, but that’s an argument that dates back to Faye’s first months on the Bebop when Spike caught her stealing his shaving kit. Knowing what he knows now, Jet can appreciate Faye’s preference for the vintage tech she grew up with, but back then it was a pretty fun spat to watch.

“Well where are you _keeping_ the list?” she bellows, closer now if the plangent echo in the hall is any indication.

“In the galley,” he starts to say, and then Faye Valentine barrels into view wearing nothing but a towel.

It’s not the first time he’s seen this. The Bebop’s not a large ship, and no cabin has its own shower, and Faye’s not exactly shy about getting from one place to another in full view of whoever’s in the lounge.Faye-in-a-bathrobe is a fixture in the lounge. But that’s the lounge, and this is the garden, this is Jet’s personal space, this is completely out of the way of both the shower and Faye’s cabin, and this isn’t a Faye-in-a-bathrobe, it’s Faye-in-a-towel.

This is deliberate, isn’t it. This is an invitation. This isn’t seeing, this is permission to look.

Faye’s beautiful; that’s been known, documented, irrefutable fact from the word go, like “stones don’t float” and “nuclear radiation causes cancer”. Faye also knows she’s beautiful, and consciously uses it to make complete suckers of anyone who gets in her way, and she’s very good at what she does. Jet’s not immune to it, exactly, but he likes to think two years of exposure therapy affords him a quick recovery from the initial salvo of Faye Valentine’s well-schooled and lethal charms. He remembers when she stumbled back onto the Bebop after that first run-in with the Red Dragon, in a skimpy red dress that was specifically designed to make you want to break the barely-there straps holding in her breasts and shove the clinging skirt up her hips and fuck her until she cried, and furthermore _her hands were tied behind her back_ and she was demanding that Jet go find Spike at some church, _now_ , and in that moment Jet would have moved Mars out of orbit for her, though once he came to his senses he thought it wouldn’t work twice.

But she wasn’t _using_ her wiles then, at least not on purpose. She was herself, and she needed something, and Jet’s been weak to that since before he can remember.

So here she is in a towel, coming into his space, and he doesn’t think she’s doing this on purpose because one of her shins is still covered in shaving foam and it’s not pointing anywhere indecent. But this is permission to look at those legs, all the way up to where they disappear under white terrycloth, and at said damp terrycloth molding to her hips, and at the span of her breasts hanging slightly lower than usual without clothes to prop them up and the persistent droplet of water that’s about to roll down her clavicle into the space between them. At her hair, wet and dark and framing her chin like a brushstroke in an ink-painting. And her face. Her exasperated, fresh face, without any of her field makeup or mischief.

She trusts him enough to let him see this. He wishes he knew when, exactly, that happened, because that makes him feel like he could rebuild Earth from scratch.

“It’s in the galley,” he repeats, because she’s still looking at him for an answer, and the army of thoughts that just paraded through his head has nothing to do with what new toiletries they need to buy for the ship.

“Right,” she drawls, though instead of turning and going back around the hall, she peers into the room at the plants. “How’d you pick this up, anyway?”

He shrugs the shoulder of the arm that doesn’t exist. “To work on my fine motor control,” he answers. Because if she’s trusting him with the unpolished truth of her, he should by all rights do the same.

She nods, wincing a little – maybe that was more real an answer than she expected – but she comes in and reaches across him, and now he can’t just look at her but smell her and feel the residual heat pinging through the air and _oh, this is how we’re playing this_ he thinks, as she pinches a branch between her fingers. “This one, right?”

The scissors. The lack of plural hands. Right. “Right,” he says, and holds onto his balance long enough to lean in and clip the little branch free.

She pulls back, still holding the twig, and sidles back into the hall with one last smiling cock of her head. She hums to herself, a tune Jet finds vaguely familiar, that he might have once heard on a Spanish guitar, a melody with no words to begin with.

Jet turns back to his little trees, running his fingers along the leaves. He might let them grow wild for a little longer.

 

*      *

It’s a long damn way to Europa. Faye asks him to teach her how to play shogi.

Two, literally, can play this game.

They spend the better part of six hours smoking, listening to swing-psychadelia, and drinking half-frozen beer as he walks her through the rules, one round of guided play, and one round where Jet doesn’t give her any hints, just corrections. It’s no surprise whatsoever that she’s got a knack for it – Poker Alice she may not be, but the woman knows her strategy, and she can breathe games like air – but it’s a mild surprise that she can immediately read the traditional characters on Jet’s gamepieces. Spike couldn’t, but then again he said once that only one of his grandparents could trace her ancestry to China, and the Syndicate must not have used much traditional writing, at least not about generals and chariots and incense. He points this out in the middle of game two, when she laughs and asks if she’s got him off guard yet.

“I was born in Singapore,” Faye points out. “I learned it in school.”

She makes a strong move, with that, a well-placed footsoldier in the seventh file: Jet takes his time to contemplate his next. He’s not going easy on her, exactly, but he’s more interested in making sure she knows how to play than in making sure he wins. “What was it like?” he asks, to stall for time—and a second later thinks he might have to kick himself for doing so. “You don’t have to answer that,” he says.

“No,” she says, quickly, maybe a little too quickly, “it’s fine. I’m assuming you mean Earth.”

He looks at her across the lit board. Her eyes are down, but her forehead isn’t knotted or set. If he hadn’t just maybe crossed a line, he’d think she was only planning her next move, or trying to anticipate his. Maybe she is. But he takes the pressure off as much as he can without saying anything, turning his eyes to the board, to the representative battle. He could bring the silver general into play. Or maybe rout her flying chariot.

If she’s going to talk about it, he’ll listen, but he won’t make her. No more than she’d make him.

“It was dying before we killed it,” Faye says, quietly. “That’s probably not want you wanted to hear, but that’s what we were living. I was in a wealthy country but we were at sea level, and you’ve been back since, so you’ve seen it. There was a split between people who thought we should spend our money on fixing things, and people who thought we should get the gates up and running as soon as possible so we could start a mass evacuation. Honestly I tried not to think about it, but I didn’t imagine Earth would actually, you know. End, basically.”

Jet’s fingertips hover over his knight.

“You tell a lot of stories, Jet,” she goes on. “The way you tell them, about islands and cities and mountains in Africa, they’re the same kinds I’d hear when I was a child. My grandmother told me once, before she died, about the time she swam with sharks. She went somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore, and they put her in a diving suit and a cage, and they let the cage sink down into the ocean with her in it. And they killed a fish so that the sharks would come, and she got to see them swarm around her, like aliens trying to learn to speak. She reached out and touched one on the nose. She could see all its teeth, but it was soft and alive. It didn’t feel like the sharkskin they used to make wallets or old books – it felt like a person. But she had to see it from inside a cage, because it was too dangerous.

“I remember thinking, when she told me, that Earth was like that all the time. It was a place where almost everyone on it thought it was all there was, so they wanted to go everywhere, see everything, climb all over it, but it always fought back. I was lucky, I got to travel a lot. My parents set foot on every continent. I got to see five. People would tell me that there was so much to learn and so much to explore and understand, but I always just felt like me, going places, looking at them all from inside a little cage. I thought maybe I’d understand when I got older. I guess I’ll never know.

“My parents didn’t want to leave, exactly. But they did want to see space. And so did I. That’s how I, well. That’s how I happened. But I remember being in the shuttle and looking out at Earth and thinking, _that doesn’t look like a place anymore,_ like all the places I’d been before weren’t real either, like I’d seen them through glass.”

Through all of this, she’s been looking anywhere but Jet. Her eyes have found the board, the pieces, the cans of beer lined up like a firing squad along the table’s edge, the stars coasting by outside. Jet knows this, because he’s looking at her, though he’s not quite sure when that started. Lit by the board, she’s all in high contrast, nearly black-and-white.

It’s how she feels all the time, isn’t it.

The silence is long, and not awkward exactly, but heavy and still. A pin could drop, or a signal beep, and the world would ripple out and shatter like impact in slow motion.

She finally looks him in the eyes, just long enough to break off and shake her head, dismissing whatever else was to come. “Also, there were bugs, everywhere, like all the time,” she says. “And you couldn’t predict the weather, even though we all pretended we could.”

“I can’t stand bugs,” Jet agrees, because telling her that yes, he can relate, yes, he sometimes feels like his life happened around him until it was too late to live it, yes, even if he doesn’t know what it’s like to lose everything all at once he _does_ know what it’s like to lose everything, yes, he’s still here too but not all of him and getting on without everything he’s lost still only means three quarters of him is moving forward, even if all that is true saying it would take something away from her.

He suspects she knows. She wouldn’t have told him all this if she didn’t.

“Your move,” she says eventually, lighting another cigarette.

 

*    *

He signs off the call with the surgeon and brings up the specs for the new arm model. Three more days to Europa. Five to surgery, six to reinstall. He can make it, he’s been through worse, and while this new arm isn’t going to be state-of-the-art neither was the old one, and this is still a couple of steps up. Better palm and joint sensory modules. Backup solar power option. Apparently the nerve interface has a sensitivity calibration so that he can turn off pain, which is interesting from a philosophical standpoint but eminently practical. He studies them for about an hour, even takes notes so he’ll know what to ask on the next call in a couple of days, right before they enter the orbit queue.

Faye’s going to tease him about finally coming in to the 21st century. He’ll tease her right back about having been here for a while.

Just when he’s shut the terminal down, he realizes that his machine wasn’t the only one running. There’s faint audio coming from the cabin row—

—and a light on in Spike’s room.

Truth to the ears of the ancient gods, Jet’s probably lost a month off his life by the time his mind catches up with reality. He walks, doesn’t run, out of the lounge, leaving the terminal behind, and knows he’s not going to see a ghost when he comes to that door, but can’t prepare himself for what else he might find either. He stakes it out, like he’s on the job, and that’s a ghost too – and comes up on the cabin door.

The audio, and the only light, are coming from Spike’s terminal. It’s one of the Bruce Lee vids he always watched, though Jet can’t tell which one, they’ve all blurred together and besides; Faye is sprawled on Spike’s bed in a sleep shirt that Jet thinks might have been his at one point, watching, intently.

“My dad loved him too,” Faye says. “Bruce Lee. Not Spike.”

Jet comes into the room, but leaves the door open. The light of the vid flashes and twitches through the posters on Spike’s wall, the speed bag dangling silent in the corner, the cactus and the sombrero and that weird wood carving of a fish lining the far wall. The rusty fold-out desk. The hamper that probably needs cleaning.

“He was little kid when Bruce Lee died. He’d seen all his films, called him Hong Kong Jesus. I think he would have liked Spike too.”

Tentatively, Jet sits on the edge of the bed. Faye’s got a bottle of something nestled in the crook of her arm; when the light from the vid gets bright enough, he recognizes a mezcal brand from the planet they were just on. Definitely not meant to drink alone. Then again, who is Jet to talk.

“He was a hard man to like,” Jet says, but he’s nodding all the same. “But kindred spirits find their common haunting ground.”

With a rustle and a little huff of air, Faye shifts on the bed so she can prop her head on her hand and “Did you ever,” she starts, then shifts again so her knees are up against Jet’s back and the movie is just _playing_ , old school Chinese too fast for Jet to follow.

“Did I ever what?”

“With Spike,” she drawls, the edge of a whine on her tone still not quite making the meaning clear. “Did you ever.”

Clearly there is something Jet’s not getting. “Of course I liked him, I lived with him ten years.”

Groaning, and rolling her eyes, Faye knees Jet in the small of his back, and sits up. Yes, that’s definitely one of his old shirts. She takes a long swig, clearly not her first of the night, and then thrusts the bottle of mezcal in Jet’s general direction. “Did you fuck him,” she says.

Oh. Good thing Jet’s not holding the bottle all on his own, otherwise he might have dropped it. When he does take it, he stalls, because you don’t just ask someone that when he’s dead and you’re sitting in his room, watching his old movies, smelling his old sheets. “Did you?” he asks, very clearly stalling for time and not caring if Faye knows.

“No,” she says, simply and on a _tsk_ through her teeth, though the breath after that comes out a sigh and she brings her knees up to her chest and hugs them. “Couple close calls, though. Definitely thought about it. Might even have wanted to, if he wasn’t such an idiot. You didn’t answer my question.”

That’s because Jet hasn’t had enough to drink. It won’t kick in fast enough, but he chugs down enough for it to be an excuse in the morning. It tastes like old burnt corn and settles in his gut. Bruce Lee breaks someone’s jaw with his foot on the other side of the room.

“Once,” Jet answers. “Once, toward the beginning. Not my thing, and I’m not sure it was his either.”

Something like disappointment washes down from Faye’s hairline all the way to her mouth. “Don’t usually go in for men?”

“Not the part that mattered to either of us. He just wanted to blow off some steam, and I’m not the kind of person you can do that with.” Jet admitted that to himself long ago. It feels...weightless, he decides, to tell it to someone else. And maybe it’ll be a warning, to Faye. “I don’t just let go.”

“No shit,” she says. “Give that back.”

He smiles. He’ll do it, but he’ll take another swig first.

When Faye gets her hands on it again – they brush against his, and they’re warm and slick – she goes straight for another long drink, long and sharp enough that Jet can see her throat pulse. “You do let go, though.” Her voice is hoarse, probably from the alcohol. “I’ve seen it. You let your woman go. You let Ed go. You let _him_ go.”

Okay, not just from the alcohol. Either way, Jet holds his hand out for the bottle again, and Faye shoves it to him, hard enough that he can hear it slosh over the rhythm of Bruce Lee’s decisive strikes, preserved for eternity on Spike’s terminal, on Spike’s wall.

“Didn’t want to hold him back,” Jet says. It’s a shitty justification, but it’s there. He wets his palate with another sip, and it only works a little. “Didn’t want to hold any of them back. That doesn’t mean I’m not holding on to them. You can move on without letting go. That’s what they all did, isn’t it?”

“He’s _dead,_ you asshole.”

“Not in here he isn’t.”

“Spare me the existential bullshit, Jet. He’s dead, he’s not coming back, and you let him walk right into hell just because he said he wanted to go!”

“So did you,” he says.

Bruce Lee plays on. Faye’s eyes are shining enough to refract the light of the screen, especially at the bottom where the tears are gathering.

Jet takes a long, long gulp of the shitty mezcal, then sets the bottle aside on the ledge at the head of Spike’s bed, right between an ashtray and a cheap plastic turtle he won in some arcade somewhere. “So did you,” he repeats. “You think I didn’t hear those gunshots? You think I couldn’t hear you crying? I know what goes on on my ship, and I know what goes off it. You didn’t stop him either, and you know why? Because he was right. If he didn’t go off, he’d be just as dead as if he did, as dead as he already thought he was.

“My partner was a corpse, Faye. A walking corpse. First thing he told me was he’d already died once. The _first damn thing he told me_ , before I even got his name. I took him on for a job I couldn’t do alone and I asked if he could handle it and he told me, _I’ve already died once, so whatever it is, it can’t be worse_. He sure was alive enough to complain about my food, though,” he adds, to lighten the mood a little, but that doesn’t work on Faye and frankly it doesn’t work on him either, because when you’re overflowing like this it’s a choice between words or tears and he knows which spigot of his tends not to turn off. “You weren’t here those first few years, when it was just the two of us. I’d seen my share of people shutting themselves off, hell I’d done it myself before I left the force, but he took it to a whole new level. The man that walked off the Bebop wasn’t the corpse that walked onto it, and hell I’m _proud_ that he wanted something enough to go and do it. And I don’t pretend to understand him, or this,” he gestures at the vid, the walls, “but I know holding back from holding on. At least, I do now.”

“You still let him go,” Faye says. Her voice hiccups. The tears, if they are tears, haven’t started falling yet, but they’ll find their own way out, and Jet still has no idea what to do with a crying woman but he’s got a little time, he thinks. “Some Black Dog you are.”

“You’ve never had a problem letting go,” he chides, maybe more gently than he intends do. “Your problem is knowing it’s okay to hold on.”

That does it. That gets the tears to fall. They’re hot and angry and he knows this because Faye’s launched herself across the bed and buried them in the crook of his neck where he doesn’t have a shoulder. Her breath’s coming so hard that her back is shaking, and he finds his hand hovering over it.

Maybe the last ten people to put their arms around Faye Valentine are very, very dead, but if it’s only one arm, maybe it doesn’t count.

He places his palm on her back, right between her shoulder-blades. He can feel the earthquakes in her spine through her, his, shirt. If she flinches from his touch it’s lost in the crying, but her hands are free to act and she doesn’t push him away, so that’s probably fine. If it’s not, she’ll say. She’s Faye.

“I didn’t know,” she says through the wetness at his collar. “I couldn’t tell.”

“But you wanted him to stay,” he whispers. His voice is shaking too. “I know. That’s okay. That’s really okay. I did too.”

She punches him lightly in the side, which he takes as a signal to remove his hand, but once he does she makes this strange snarling-sniffling sound in her throat and flops down into his lap. “Don’t stop,” she says, and all right that is an uncomfortable position for her to be saying it from but this is clearly not Faye trying to seduce him, so he takes it at face value whether he can see her face or not.

“What, wanting him to have stayed?”

“That too,” she huffs, and tosses her head so that she’s facing the terminal screen, and her hair spreads over his thigh.

Oh.

For a few more minutes, they watch Bruce Lee, and smell Spike’s sheets, and Jet strokes her hair absently. It’s soft and fine, so unlike his own. By the time he feels the alcohol having very much caught up with him, she’s already nodded off. All he knows is that he can’t sleep in here, and she shouldn’t either, so he gathers her up in his arm and carries her back to her room. She’s not light, exactly, but not too much to carry.

Maybe he’s a little clumsier than he means to be when he deposits her on the bed, but she wakes up enough to mumble at him, “Stay.”

He can’t help the chuckle. “You know who you’re talking to, Faye?”

She rolls her eyes, though they crinkle shut with casual sleep before they can come back down. “Stay, _Jet,_ ” she says, and scoots over toward the wall, making room for him at her back.

 _Don’t leave me, you shithead,_ she’s saying.

None of the beds on this boat are built for two, exactly, but there’s just enough space for Jet to lie down behind her, if he drapes his arm around her waist. She curls closer, and her chin tilts toward Jet’s as if she’d try to look him over if she could, and her breath is close enough to rustle his beard.

She’d taste like mezcal and salt.

He doesn’t kiss her to find out. He doesn’t kiss her at all, actually. But their faces hover close, vulnerable and raw, until sleep shifts her out of his view and into the dark.

He follows, by which he means, he stays.

 

*  *

The thing about space travel—

(Never mind how many _things_ there are about space travel, not the least of which is that it’s space travel.)

—the thing about space travel is that the morning after is an abstract concept, because _morning_ itself is an abstract concept, and while _after_ is a cosmic and temporal certainty because of both physics and a mild headache, _morning_ and _Faye Valentine_ are not usually related and therefore _after_ is an utter mindfuck.

Which is to say that Jet wakes up, and it’s probably morning by the ship’s cycle but he has no idea where Faye’s clock is, and Faye’s behind is nestled right against Jet’s front, and his commandeered shirt has ridden up her hips to reveal the flimsy purple underwear she wears to sleep. Perhaps more importantly (though certain parts of Jet’s anatomy think that this development is Priority Goddamn Alpha), with her hair crumpled and a pillow-crease on her cheek and her soft shoulders hunched in like she’s holding precious cargo in her chest, she’s adorable.

Regardless, whatever she asked of him last night, waking up sober might have changed the rules. He extricates himself carefully and quietly – and it works, because she just sags into the warm indentation he left with a wordless grumble – and adjusts his clothes before padding out. He leaves her door open, so he won’t have to reopen it when he comes back with a bottle of water and a box of cheese-flavored crackers, which he sets within reach on her board. He also starts up rice in the cooker , since he knows _he’s_ going to need a decent breakfast after a good long shower. Maybe there’s enough beef bullion and fried onion flakes to fake some congee. Or maybe he should just use the plum jam before it goes bad. Maybe Faye likes sour plum. The way her tastes run, she probably would. Then again, if she did, would it still be in the fridge?

Her tearstains are still on his collar when he peels his shirt off. He leaves it, and the rest of his clothes, on the bathroom floor.

He puts on some old moombahton-funk while he takes care of shower prep. Sealing the medical plastic over his shoulder-socket takes some shuffling, as usual. They’re running low on waterproof tape. He’ll put it on the list.

Okay. Last night is a thing that happened. It is also a thing that may mean absolutely nothing today. He turns the shower on, checks to make sure his stuff’s still in it, gets a washcloth and gets in and gets going. _The way Faye’s tastes run, ha,_ he thinks, he knows nothing whatsoever about the way Faye’s tastes run, except apparently that they’re starting to run to him a little and Whitney Haggis is very much in prison. Besides, they’ll have to be a _team_ now, just the two of them, where Spike used to be, and that’s much more important than anything else they could become.

It takes far too long to build up a good lather one-handed. His fingers feel dry and cracked, as sore as the rest of his skin.

Yes, but. Yes, he’s interested, but. The situation’s too fragile to make a move. She might not stay. For a moment he sees Alisa across from him, complaining that he treated her like a child, that he decided everything for her, and Jet will bet every woolong in the bank that Faye doesn’t want that either. Which means now he’s thinking about Faye in the shower, and what Faye might want, from him of all people.

Wishful thinking. She was drunk, she was exhausted, she just needed to get her grief out. Like Spike did. He’ll let it—

The door slams open. The curtain _yanks_ open, and there she is, still wearing his rumpled shirt and looking a furious mess.

“I said _stay,_ asshole,” she snarls.

Jet stares.

Apparently he stares too long because she climbs into the shower and grabs his dick.

Oh.

The fact that she’s kissing him (and yes, _yes_ she tastes like mezcal and salt and cool water) is actually more surprising than how she’s pressing against him, his shirt on her soaked and hot between their bodies. The water pounds down around them and drills in Jet’s ears and he leans down, tilts to make it easier. She’s on her tiptoes. She’s on her tiptoes, in the shower, _with him_ , and it’s still not quite enough for them to kiss and do this at the same time but she tightens her grip and peels him back and okay, fine, head meet wall, this is what she wants.

The hand that isn’t working on him is right in the center of his chest, pushing him where she wants him which is apparently against the wall so the water’s mostly coming down on her. Jet manages to crane down and force his eyes open (when did they close?, oh right, they were just kissing, they should start that up again), and she’s glaring up at him through the steam. Her eyes are hotter than the water, pupils and mouth blown wide, water clinging to her cheeks and hair. This isn’t the face she’s put on for marks. There’s a plea in it. A way in, or a way out.

“Let go,” she says.

It means something completely different, when she says it. He still gives her exactly what they both want.

He snatches both her wrists in his hand, spins them both around so _she’s_ on the wall, and pins her hands over her head. Fences her in. Kisses her until neither of them can breathe. Feels the water and her heel pounding into his back as she wraps him in a leg and grinds on him, the heavy soaked shirt definitely in the way of more but he can fix that, not now but he can fix that, later when now doesn’t feel so damn good.

By the time the water runs cold, she’s got both legs around him, and the rest of her body begging, slicking him up where the water doesn’t reach. Somehow he shoves her soaked underwear aside and gets in and she gasps into his mouth, curses, yesses, threads of his his name in there while they both start to move together. It works. This works. It works, it’s right, cold water and cold space and cold past and all, it’s right. She scalds around him. She leaves something new behind.

When he lets go of her wrists, she clings to his shoulders, prizing his upper back with her nails and _fuck,_ that’s good – he works his hand between them, gets fingers onto her so she can let go too, fucks her between them. It’s hell holding her up like this but gravity brings her down, over and over, her skin slapping his every time his hips jerk and her legs tighten.

She muffles a shuddering shout with a solid _bite_ near his neck, just to the right of the medical tape. It’s enough to make him stop caring how hard he thrusts. From how she keeps egging him on until they’re both boneless and shaking in a heap on the shower floor, she doesn’t care either.

Even after they’re done, she keeps her arms around him. He holds her close too, but it just takes the one. He’s mostly covering her, like this, which is a position he can definitely get used to. He’ll be holding on to this for a good long while.

“Turn the water off,” she whines. “It’s fucking _freezing.”_

“You do it,” he says, grinning, rubbing his chin on her throat.

She does it, all right. She does it with her foot. While the rest of her is still around him.

That leads directly into round two.

 

**

The surgeon-tech doesn’t remark on the bruise, which is still in the shape of a bite and more to the point still _there_ , even though he’s had two full days to crack a joke. Maybe he cracked them all while Jet was unconscious. Either way, he just wheels Jet out of recovery, chattering about how he’s excited to totally make Jet’s day. Into reinstall they go, where he checks the new socket rig with tools and a scope and tiny wire clippers. He unveils the arm on a surgical tray, shiny and balanced, like a prized piece of art, and Jet has to admit, it kind of is.

“Sorry I’m late,” Faye calls on the same hiss as the opening door, sauntering in to the ward without a care in the world. She takes down her sunglasses, and yes that’s the lethal Faye Valentine charm at work, but the twinkle in her eyes is all for Jet.

“You his woman?” the tech asks.

“I’m his partner,” Faye corrects.

The new arm clicks into place. There’s no strain on Jet’s neck whatsoever.

 

*

[are you gonna be in my dreams?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR4TDBXebWc)


End file.
